The concept of a Cooperative Virtual Machine can be understood in this way – traditional virtualization solutions such as from VMware or Xen are unprivileged and therefore are under the complete control of the host system but in Cooperative Virtual Machine the core processes of both the operating systems independently run.

Advantage of this approach is to achieve a good performance with relatively less development time. The disadvantage is that, instabilities and vulnerabilities of the guest system to the host system. In case of crashes on traditional virtualization solution, from the host system it can be stopped and restarted. A Cooperative Virtual Machine can also crash the host system. Because of its deep integration in the host system Cooperative Virtual Machine run with administrator privileges and has also the probability of malicious softwares in the guest to get full access to the host system. – read more